Hydropolitics along the Jordan River. Scarce Water and Its Impact on the Arab-Israeli Conflict (UNU, 1995, 272 pages)

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. Hydrography and history

3. Towards an interdisciplinary approach to water basin analysis and the resolution of international water disputes

4. Interdisciplinary analysis and the Jordan River watershed

5. Summary and conclusions

Afterword: Parting the waters

Appendices

Sources

Afterword: Parting the waters

... but let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty
stream. Amos 5:24

There is a certain risk involved in attempting an analysis of contemporary
issues recent history seems to be developing a perplexing habit of outpacing
publishing schedules. This work is certainly a case in point.

When I began looking at the relationship between water and politics in the
Middle East more than seven years ago, I was fairly comfortable that I would be
working in a static environment. Modern political conflict between Arabs and
Jews in the region had gone back at least a century, after all, and ancient
enmities between the two peoples dated back millennia. Certainly the world's
intractable conflicts were increasingly finding hidden tractability - nuclear
weapons were being destroyed in the crumbling Soviet empire, Blacks were gaining
suffrage in South Africa, and pieces from the Berlin Wall were being sold as
paperweights in finer boutiques. But the Arab-Israeli conflict felt different;
almost divinely intractable.

It wasn't. What I first asked as a hypothetical academic question back in
1988, "What if there were a peace process - what would the water issues be
and how might they be resolved?" has been superseded by a blur of stunning
images. Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn.
King Hussein at the controls of a Royal Jordanian jet circling Jerusalem, being
wished Godspeed by Shimon Peres from below. Barbed wire and mine fields being
cleared from the banks of the Jordan River to allow the people of the region to
cross more freely.

The question I posed is no longer hypothetical. There is a peace process
that, to date, has produced a declaration of principles allowing Israelis and
Palestinians to recognize one another as legitimate political entities, and a
peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, formally ending a 46-year state of war
between these uneasy neighbours. And water has been a vital, sometimes
overriding factor in these agreements. The creation of a Palestinian Water
Authority was an important aspect of the Declaration of Principles, and its
announcement and acceptance led to a particularly productive round of
multilateral negotiations in Oman in April 1994. Conversely, the issue of water
rights was identified as the final issue requiring resolution before the peace
treaty between Israel and Jordan was able to be signed.

Some updating of chapter 2 is necessary: The Declaration of Principles signed
between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on 13 September 1993
came about as a result of intense secret talks now known as the Oslo
negotiations (exploratory contacts for which were reportedly made, incidentally,
at the 1992 Israeli-Palestinian conference on water in Zurich). Although the
declaration was generally seen as a positive development by most parties, some
minor consternation was expressed by the Jordanians about the
Israeli-Palestinian agreement to investigate a possible Med-Dead Canal. In the
multilateral working group on regional economic development, the Italians had
pledged $2.5 million towards a study of a RedDead Canal as a joint
Israeli-Jordanian project; building both would be unfeasible. The Israelis
pointed out in private conversations with the Jordanians that all possible
projects should be investigated, and only then could rational decisions on
implementation be made.

Although a bilateral agreement, the Declaration of Principles helped
streamline a logistically awkward aspect of the ongoing multilateral
negotiations, as the PLO became openly responsible for representing the
Palestinians - previously the Palestinian delegation had been affiliated with
the Jordanian delegation. By the fifth round of water talks in Beijing in
October 1993, somewhat of a routine seemed to be setting in at the multilateral
negotiations, whereby reports were presented on each of the four topics agreed
to at the second meeting in Vienna - enhancement of data availability; enhancing
water supply; water management and conservation; and concepts of regional
cooperation and management.!

The sixth and most recent round of talks was held in Muscat, Oman, in April
1994, the first of the water talks to be held in an Arab country and the first
of any working group to be held in the Gulf. Tensions mounted immediately before
the talks as it became clear that the Palestinians would use the occasion as a
platform to announce the appointment of a Palestinian National Water Authority.
While such an authority was called for in the Declaration of Principles,
possible responses to both the unilateral nature and to the appropriateness of
the working group as the proper vehicle for the announcement were unclear. Only
a flurry of activity prior to the talks guaranteed that the announcement would
be welcomed by all parties. This agreement set the stage for a particularly
productive meeting. In two days, the working group endorsed:

an Omani
proposal to establish a desalination research and technology centre in Muscat,
which would support regional cooperation in desalination research among all
interested parties. This marked the first Arab proposal to find consensus in the
working group;

an Israeli proposal to rehabilitate and make more
efficient water systems in small sized communities in the region. This was the
first Israeli proposal to be accepted by any working group;

a German
proposal to study the water supply and demand development among interested core
parties in the region;

a US proposal to develop waste-water treatment
and reuse facilities for small communities at several sites in the region. The
proposal was jointly sponsored by the water and environmental working
groups;

implementation of a US/KU regional training programme.

Recent progress made in bilateral negotiations between Jordan and Israel has
outpaced the multilateral negotiations. On 7 June 1994, the two states announced
that they had reached an agreement on a sub-agenda for cooperation, building on
an agenda for peace talks that had been agreed to 14 September 1993, which would
lead eventually to a peace treaty. This sub-agenda included several waterrelated
items, notably in the first heading listed (in advance of security issues, and
border and territorial matters), Group A - Water, Energy, and the Environment:

Surface water basins.

Negotiation of mutual recognition of the rightful water
allocations of the two sides in Jordan River and Yarmuk River waters with
mutually acceptable quality.

Restoration of water quality in the Jordan
River below Lake Tiberias to reasonably usable standards.

Protection of
water quality.

Shared
groundwater aquifers.

Renewable fresh water aquifers - southern area between the Dead Sea and the
Red Sea.

Fossil aquifers - area between the Dead Sea and the Red
Sea.

Protection of the water quality of both.

Alleviation of water shortage.

Development of water resources.

Municipal water shortages.

Irrigation water shortages.

Potentials of future bilateral
cooperation, within a regional context where appropriate.

An
additional 50 MCM/yr. will be developed through joint projects, to be determined
by a Joint Water Committee;

Jordan will store 20 MCM/yr. of winter
flood water in the Sea of Galilee, to be returned during summer months - flood
water in addition to current uses will be split between the two countries;

Two dams will be constructed - one each on the Yarmuk and the Jordan (Israel
can use up to 3 MCM/yr. of increased storage capacity).

The pace of conflict resolution in the region puts the predictive aspects of
this work in an interesting (if occasionally unsettling) position - many of my
conclusions can actually be tested against the real world. Many of the
recommendations and con fidence-building measures of chapter 4 are, in fact,
being implemented, in roughly the order suggested. (With one conspicuous
exception - discussions of water rights have routinely been postponed as too
intricate to deal with early. It is recognized, though, that a final arrangement
over water resources in the region is not possible without addressing this vital
aspect.) While I leave it for future study to determine precisely how close
these predictive aspects came to reality, these preliminary results seem to
reinforce the methodology described here as a useful tool for integrated water
management in other basins with conflicting political interests.

Regardless, the changes in the region are overpowering. The Palestinian flag
flies freely over official buildings of the Palestinian Authority. Israelis
visit the Nabatean city of Petra, carved into the rose-red sandstone of Wadi
Musa. Jordanians swim in the Sea of Galilee. Despite the horrendous efforts of
extremists of all sides, the region seems to be moving inexorably towards peace,
towards a time when one can take a train from Cairo to Damascus, when military
bands practice and perform together, when the boundaries on maps used for water
resources planning in the Jordan basin are only those of the watershed itself.